


What Whiskey Won't Cure

by alwaysamy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-19
Updated: 2010-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 00:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alwaysamy/pseuds/alwaysamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean knows the value of a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Whiskey Won't Cure

**Author's Note:**

> Vague spoilers for 6.01 (nothing more than what's seen in the previews). Title from the adage, "What whiskey won't cure, there's no cure for."

Whiskey shows up in Dean's dreams once in a while.

Not that kind of whiskey -- well, okay, sure, that does, too -- but _Whiskey_. Sometimes he's in the passenger seat of the car, sometimes he's the things Dean is looking everywhere for, wandering in the woods or in drafty old houses sticky with cobwebs. Sometimes he whispers in Dean's ear, telling him which way to turn or all about the hot twins he spotted in a bar outside of town.

Dean always wakes up mildly embarrassed, straddling a vague line between grateful and stinging with nostalgia.

Of everyone in his life, Whiskey is the only one who never once let him down.

***

Dean is two, hands wrapped tight around the handle of the shopping cart because Mommy says, "No, not in the back, baby."

Mommy lets him help, putting apples in the bag and picking cereal. He drives a packet of sponges across the cart's handle, making vroom noises, while Mommy talks to Mrs. Freitag. When he kicks his feet, Mommy pats his knee until he stops, and finally she pushes the cart around the corner into the next aisle.

Halfway down, while Mommy reads her list aloud -- "Orange juice, frozen green beans, English muffins" -- Dean points and grabs her arm. "Mommy!"

The rabbit is white with big floppy ears and a soft pink nose, bright as snow. He's the biggest. The skinny blue rabbits, the fat pink rabbits, and the brown rabbits with the funny hats are all too little, baby bunnies, not big like this one. "Lookit rabbit, Mommy!"

Mommy stops the cart and looks up from her list, before pushing his hair off his forehead. "What it is, buddy?"

" _Dat_ , Mommy. Rabbit."

Dean wriggles when she crosses the aisle to take it off the shelf, his sneakers banging against the metal cart. "Mommy, p'ease."

"Eastertime again, I guess." She's petting Dean's rabbit, smiling, and Dean pounds on the handle with his fists.

 _"Mommy!"_

"Okay!" She laughs and hands it to him. "You like the bunny, huh?"

"Rabbit," Dean says, and plucks at the whiskers.

"What's his name?"

Dean searches her face, his hands buried in the soft fur. She's still smiling. She smells warm, like the big bed and Daddy, and her hair tickles his cheek when she bends down to kiss his forehead.

"How about Mr. Whiskers?" she says, and rights one flopping ear.

"Mizwhiskey," Dean agrees, and settles the rabbit on his lap.

Mommy makes a funny noise like a sneeze. "Close enough, sweetie."

***

Whiskey listens, when it's dark. Daddy says to call him Whiskers, but it still comes out wrong. Mommy didn't care. Mommy smiled and called him Whiskey, too.

Dean brings Whiskey into Sammy's crib when Sammy's asleep, and talks to him. "I miss Mommy," he whispers, mouth pressed to the matted fur on Whiskey's nose. He smells funny now, like milk Mommy would tell him not to drink, a little bit like pee from Sammy's diaper, a little bit like smoke. The tip of one ear is black where the fire licked it.

"Mike says Daddy's sad, but he talks mad all the time." His breath ruffles Whiskey's fur, tickling his nose as it moves, so he nuzzles closer. Sam sighs and rolls over, fat little fist flung out and just missing Dean's cheek. He closes his hand around it and holds on.

Sammy isn't mad, he's too little. But he cries a lot, sniffles and holds out his arms until someone picks him up. He misses Mommy, too. Daddy doesn't smell like Mommy, isn't soft all over like Mommy, and Dean misses that, so he guesses Sammy does, too.

Whiskey isn't mad. Whiskey isn't sad, either. Whiskey doesn't miss Mommy because he has Dean. Or Dean has him, he's not sure. Whiskey just is, right there, always there, and Dean is glad Daddy carried him out of the fire. The grownups want Dean to talk to them, but the words clog up his throat and make his chest hurt, just like the smoke did.

Whiskey doesn't mind if he whispers. Whiskey doesn't reach for him, crowding and cooing, when he cries. Whiskey doesn't care if he doesn't talk at all.

For a long time, he doesn't talk to anyone else.

***

Sam never has a teddy bear.

Well, he does, plenty of them -- stuffed dogs, a plush kitten, a floppy, shaggy bear with a bow tie. The women who babysit for them, the old ladies at Pastor Jim's church, occasionally a soft-hearted motel maid, they take one look at little Sammy and melt all over his brown curls and huge, curious eyes. Next thing Dean knows, Sam's got a squishy dinosaur or a sleek gray seal to add to the family.

What he doesn't have is a stalwart, a second, a trusted confidante who always claims pride of place on his pillow, who shows the most wear from being clutched tight during nightmares or thunderstorms.

He doesn't need one, after all. He has Dean.

Sometimes Dean wonders why those women don't give him anything, other than a hand-me-down water pistol or a rusty Tonka. Once, he looks in the silvered bathroom mirror in a motel somewhere in Texas, and pretends Sam is right there with him, small and sleepy, yawning up at Dean and clutching his sleeve with a sticky hand.

Next to that Dean's freckles look dirty, his hair cut too short and too rough, and his smile, when he tries it, looks like the start of a snarl. He stops wondering why no one sees him as a kid who needs a polyfil buddy.

Wouldn't matter anyway. He has Whiskey, even if he lives at the bottom of Dean's duffle most of the time now, where Sam won't see him, want him, smear jelly on him and chew his ears while he watches TV, because even at four he still chews on stuff.

Whiskey is the one thing Dean doesn't share, not even with Sammy.

***

Dad finds Whiskey when Dean is thirteen.

He's cleaning the trunk, repacking gear and checking the supply stash before another move, working off some mad about a hunt gone wrong, tearing the bare bones of their lives apart. Dean's glad he's not drinking instead, but when Dad finds Whiskey tucked in a duffel full of spare clothes and extra bandages, a few threadbare towels and an old army blanket, he freezes anyway, waiting for a barked-out laugh or at least a raised eyebrow.

There are so many things Dad could say. Should say, probably. That Dean's too old to cart something like that around, they don't have room in the trunk for anything not strictly necessary, he's thirteen now, not a little kid--but Dad doesn't say any of that. He looks at it for a minute, his huge hand the color of warm leather around the thing's pilled gray fur. There's dried blood on its belly from a long-ago nosebleed, another stain that Dean can't identify, and stuffing dribbles out of one foot.

Dean just watches, heart pounding as Dad fondles one of its ears. That's a totally fucked up word for it, but Dean can't think of another way to describe Dad's big fingers stroking the length of fur so gently. He doesn't even glance at Dean before he tucks the rabbit back into the bag, careful and silent.

He finishes up a minute later, and walks back into the house without a word. Dean has no idea why he looks so haunted, face folded in on itself like a battered old cot, but he's not about to ask.

Later, when they're checked into an efficiency motel in Oklahoma and Dad's out talking to another hunter about the sightings of long-dead twins in an abandoned elementary school, Dean puts Whiskey at the bottom of his own duffel again, just because.

***

Whiskey helps save Dean's life when he's seventeen.

Dad's out cold in the back of the Impala, his back torn to ribbons by a werewolf, and Sam's soaking wet from plunging through the stream in the woods to get to him. Dean rolled him up in the army blanket, Dad's back is packed with all of their spare towels and bandages, and it's not until Dean gets into the driver's seat that he realizes the hot wetness on his chest is the spillover from a bleeding wound in his own neck. He's woozy, shaking, but he manages to find the only thing left to press to this throat while he drives--Whiskey, musty and matted but still more or less intact, in terms of stuffing.

The last time he sees it is when the nurses at the ER peel it off his neck, soaked shocking red with his blood.

Three years later Sam goes to a county fair in Minnesota and comes back with a stuffed rabbit that only resembles Whiskey in the broadest sense. He gives it to Dean without laughing, without even smiling, just hands it over with a slightly limp cone of bright blue cotton candy.

"Supposed to give shit like this to your girl, Sammy," Dean tells him, but he takes it anyway when Sam just shrugs and ambles down to the hall to their bedroom.

A couple months later Dean gives it to a little girl who lost her older sister to a wraith.

***

Dean's looking for Ben's missing cleat in the bottom of closet when he finds the dog.

Downstairs, he can hear Lisa rummaging in the hall closet, muttering and scolding Ben. They're ten minutes late to the game already, and Ben is sullen with guilt, sitting on the front steps in his full uniform and a lone cleat.

Just behind a plastic crate of old comic books and outgrown Nintendo games, one black plastic eye stares up at Dean. A brown ear points up above it, a neat triangle of synthetic fur. He pulls the crate aside and reaches for the animal, which turns out to be a dog, a basic mutt, its brown fur dotted with patches of white, gone yellow with age. Its nose has been well-chewed, and its tail is hanging on by a few hardy threads, but otherwise he's pretty sturdy. Well-loved, Dean thinks, and wonders what its name is.

"Got it," Lisa calls from downstairs, and Dean shoves dog and crate back into position before he closes the closet door.

Ben's team loses spectacularly, mercy-ruled when the opposition is up by ten runs in only the third inning, and Ben gets a nasty lecture from the coach on punctuality and responsibility to the team. Dean has to bite the inside of his cheek and count to thirty to keep from leaping out of the bleachers to clock the guy.

Ben drags himself around the house all evening, refusing to look either Lisa or Dean in the eye, and Dean cracks open his bedroom door to check on him when he's closing up for the night. He's asleep, belly-down, one cheek mashed into the pillow, and there in the crook of one elbow is the dog, plastic eyes staring placidly at the ceiling.

His heart tightens like a fist, painful and familiar, and he has to fight the urge to kneel by Ben's bed, stroke his sweat-damp hair, tell him to hang onto his buddy for as long as he can.

Instead he climbs into bed beside Lisa, rolling her up against him so he soothe himself with the comfortable night-warm feel of her under his hands. Ben won't ever need his dog the way Dean needed Whiskey. He won't.

As he listens to the house settle, watches the moon drift toward the trees through the window, he can almost believe it.


End file.
